“Ralph knew he could not possibly found such a center on his own. But there was no way around it,” Roberta wrote. “Whether he found someone to help or not, he had to move, even if it meant sacrificing his own plans and security and leaving a job he loved.”
Battle with the cult
After making a bid for the Pasadena campus of Point Loma College in 1976, Winter and his small team found themselves having to battle the Summit cult to get Point Loma officials to permit him to purchase the campus. Point Loma was in desperate need of money to fund its new campus and Winter had no money.
Linda Dorr, Winter’s third daughter, recalled to The Christian Post on Monday that one of greatest miracles that occurred during the process to obtain the campus was getting Point Loma to agree to give USCWM a legal option to buy when Winter and his team offered such a small amount of money.
Usually for a property that size, at least $150,000 would be offered to hold the campus.
Winter offered $15,000.
And Point Loma officials accepted that.
As Roberta explained in her book, the officials, all Christians, were deeply troubled over the presence of the Summit on campus.
During their time on the campus, Summit members would chant and meditate in front of a giant Buddha statue. A former high-level Summit leader also revealed to USCWM that top Summit leader had the ability to read other people’s mind and could, to a certain extent, control people’s thought process. And Summit’s highest leader claimed that she was able to communicate with her dead husband.
USCWM members later found out that Summit members had chanted against them during an especially difficult time during their quest to acquire the campus. After their discovery, staff members devoted more time to praying for the campus and for spiritual protection.
Roberta said that before their encounter with Summit, many USCWM members had not taken the occult seriously. But after their experience, they all understood it was a spiritual battle.
Battle over finances
Over the next decade, USCWM struggled to pay for the newly acquired campus – first having to make the $1.5 million down payment, then the $175,000 mortgage payments, and lastly the $6.5 million balloon payment.
Nearly every payment was gathered at the last minute. Roberta recalled that a day before the first installment of the down payment was due, they still lacked $400,000 of the $850,000 needed.
“It had been a constant struggle to make our mortgage payments of $175,000 every three months for five years,” recalled Roberta. “We had fallen behind several times, once almost to the point of foreclosure.”
As part of the effort to fund the campus, Winter persuaded thousands to give “the last thousand,” as former student and now prominent pastor John Piper recalled last month.
Piper, who had Winter as a professor during his time at Fuller Seminary, said he “couldn’t resist the vision.”
“His vision of the advance of the gospel was breathtaking,” Piper recalled in his blog one day after Winter’s death on May 20, 2009.
“I think I sent $2,000.”
Despite the pressure to raise funds for the campus, Winter was determined from the start to not forget what the campus was for. While some wanted to focus on fundraising, Winter would say, “I don’t think He (God) will [give it to us] unless we show that His concerns come first.”
We must do all we can to help make missions a top priority again,” Roberta recalled him saying.
Roberta later admitted how many of the center’s members, deep inside, “had become tired of having to trust the Lord.”
“We were tired of not knowing until the last minute if we would go under or not,” she recalled.
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